For over a hundred years, Mărculeşti was a vibrant Jewish agricultural and mercantile community in Bessarabia (now present-day Moldova). In July 1941, the village was the site of an unimaginable atrocity. Seventy-four years later, few speak honestly or completely about what happened. ABSENT is a cinematic portrait of the ghost village of Mărculeşti, its current inhabitants, and their very complex relationship to their own history. Working entirely on location with a very small crew (and often without electricity), filmmaker Matthew Mishory documents one of Europe's poorest, most remote, and least-visited places. The result is a nuanced, complex, and unforgettable snapshot of a rural Moldovan village grappling with an unspeakable past and facing, in the context of global capitalism, a very uncertain future.